Wednesday, December 01, 2010

December 1 Blog Post : Collection of Thoughts

Ah December! The culmination of the Gregorian Year. A time for closure and reflection.

* This week I'll be formulating my 2011 New Year's Resolutions. I've come to the conclusion that resolutions, or promises to oneself, are in and of themselves a good thing. These resolutions will serve as goals or purposes for carrying on in the year ahead. By thinking about them and writing them down, I'm gonna get a jump on the New Year by putting them into effect immediately.

* Every December I buy a new planner. The type that I get is a calendar + daily guide that I use for a variety of things, an area where my professioanl and personal lives come together. The planner serves as a diary and at the beginning of each month I enter astrological and religious data. Yes, like our great President Reagan, I watch the stars. I'm also what you might call a "religious hobbyist" in that I enjoy reading about various religions. In our house we always mark and learn about special holidays for the world's major religions. Passover? Eid? Christmas? We celebrate and cherish these days.

* With Winter on the way, I find the number of visitors to this blog increase almost daily. It begins around Thanksgiving, peaking right around December 24-thru-30. I theorize that more working people have taken time off, and worldwide students are vacationing from school. In upper-North America, it's c-c-cold outside! They go online rather than watch reruns, parades, and end-of-year wrap-up shows on tv or listen to constant Christmas music on the radio. It's a time when I try to write more meaningful and timely posts in line with the winter, the holidays, and the "reflection time" such events foster.

* When I'm sitting at my homePC, I usually have four active browser windows: one for my email, one for Google Reader, one for the blog I'm reading at the moment and one just sitting on Google, ready to be invoked when "the need to know" strikes. I'm writing this in a text editor (TED) whilst tweeting, SMS-ing and IM-ing via my cellphone. This is how I maximize my time. I'm usually online between 4:30 and 7:30am, while making breakfast and getting ready for the workday.

* It's more difficult to write a blog like this one than it is to write a "niche" blog that targets a specific audience. I try to offer something for everyone, and 99% of the material you see here is stuff I would normally take interest in. If there were no blogs, I guess I'd be jotting my thoughts down in a small notebook.

* One thing I like to do on this blog is include "easter eggs" - little surprises you'll find either by clicking on certain text passages, or mor likely, by mousing over an clicking on images. While you won't be surprised all the time, you will be some of the time!

* A personal blog is a great place to "bookmark" stuff that happens around you in your life during the passage of time. I save favorite photos, videos, recipes etc. right here, by incorporating them into the blog. Stories I've researched and pictures I've taken find their place here as well. That's how the "Around The Blogosphere" aggregated posts came about. It began on my old "Capital Region People" blog as a sidebar feature. There used to be a neat little service called "Sidebar" - you put the widget in your sidebar and they had a very quick-loading, tiny-footprint text editor where you could upload pictures and text to your blog, without having to jump thru all the hoops to get into your blog editor! I loved the service, but one day it stopped working, and then it was gone! Something is there now, but I haven't checked to see if it works or not. After the previous experience with Sideblog, I won't be using it again. (Aside: don't forget to ALWAYS back up your blog periodically or save your posts to disc. There are many many ways to do this! Better to save it than to wake up one day to find your blog hacked or deleted or the blog platform GONE - out of business!)

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